Miscellaneous News - Page 31

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The planned main event boxing fight between boxing legend Ray Mercer and former UFC Heavyweight Champion Tim Sylvia at Adrenaline MMA 3 on May 30 is now off. The New Jersey State Athletic Control Board will not sanction the fight. This means Adrenaline 3 will be an all-MMA event. The promotion is looking for a replacement main event, and Adrenaline may try again elsewhere in June.

Charles “Mask” Lewis Jr. had all the faith in the world.
It takes nothing less to be the first of your kind, to see opportunity and potential in places where others simply do not. It takes even more to act upon that vision, to put yourself out on a limb in the face of ridicule and failure.
Lewis had faith in the sport of mixed martial arts. Through his Tapout clothing line, he championed it without a hint of hesitation to every stranger, friend, and foe alike.
Charles Lewis was one of the good guys. And that’s why his death in a horrific car crash during the early morning hours of March 11 hit the fight community so hard.
As is the case with those we cherish most, Lewis was gone too suddenly. He was on his way home from the gym with his girlfriend Lacey at 1 a.m., the only time he could fit working out into a hectic schedule. Lewis took pride in his deceiving physique, and many questioned he was really 45 years old, even after officials confirmed it.
That night, Lewis and Lacey had decided to drive by a condominium apartment they had been looking into purchasing over the next few days. It is believed Lewis’ fire-engine red Ferrari occupied the middle lane when Jeffery Kirby and his companion came up along the left side in a white 1977 Porsche. At the scene, black skid marks snake up onto the median’s curb right as the road bends slightly, then drag for 500 or more feet across the three lanes. They indicate Kirby’s car bounced off the road’s island divider before t-boning into Lewis’ vehicle’s backend, sending the Ferrari into a 180-degree spin. The car traveled backwards before the driver’s side wailed directly into a cement light pole, slicing it into two parts.
It was the first time in a few months that Lewis had had the opportunity to enjoy the luxury ride he’d purchased over a year ago. The car had slept at a friend’s showroom until Lewis had been asked to bring it to a photo shoot that day for Dub magazine. High speeds didn’t seem unfathomable under the circumstances, though friends said they couldn’t see Lewis engaging in a dangerous street race for superiority. Lewis didn’t know Kirby, nor was Lewis believed to be drinking at the time. Lewis never touched alcohol, as many will attest, including his best friend and business partner Dan “Punk Ass” Caldwell.
Lewis and Caldwell met in 1992 as sheriffs for San Bernardino County in southern Calif. Both trained in boxing and kickboxing, but soon found a mutual love in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and the early UFC events.
The name Tapout was born from the license plate on Lewis’ car. It was a way for Lewis to demonstrate his unadulterated love for the art and he displayed it around town like his badge of honor.
“Especially then, when you would ride down the freeway with ‘Tapout’ on your license plate, people would come up to you and look inside and give you a thumb’s up. That’s how you knew another jiu-jitsu guy,” said Caldwell.
When a license plate wasn’t enough, Lewis went to Caldwell with an idea for a T-shirt

Sources close to Bloody Elbow can exclusively confirm that the heretofore unnamed opponent of former WWE superstar Bobby Lashley set to square off at Roy Jones Jr.'s mixed boxing and MMA event known as "March Badness" is none other than Ken Shamrock.

This is a message to all those fighers and dojo owners that don't think it's important to keep their mats, bodies and equipment clean.
It's a long read, but I tried to highlight the key points so at least try to read them. The other text is for your further information.
Maybe it was just a bad month--an unfortunate statistical fluctuation. Maybe not. As Vance Fowler, an infectious-disease specialist at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, tells it, the first case appeared in early spring 2008: a 13-yearold girl whose bout with the flu evolved into a life-and-death struggle, still ongoing, with necrotizing pneumonia and a particularly pernicious strain of bacteria known as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Should the girl survive, her life will be "forever changed," says Fowler, from pulmonary disease caused by the death of the lung tissue. The next case, a week or so later, was a research technician from Fowler's laboratory, admitted to the hospital with a facial abscess that showed no signs of healing. Again, MRSA was the cause. A week or so after that, the victims were a husband and wife. "Both were admitted with life-threatening acute MRSA infections out of nowhere," he says. "Multiple surgeries. Life- and limb-threatening infections." Neither one worked in a hospital or a long-term care facility, the kind of environments in which such bacteria might commonly be found. Nor had they visited one recently. So how did they get it? "Bad luck, bad genes, a bad bug, or all three," says Fowler.
The last decade has seen the inexorable proliferation of a host of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, or bad bugs, not just MRSA but other insidious players as well, including Acinetobacter baumannii, Enterococcus faecium, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Enterobacter species. The problem was predictable--"resistance happens," as Karen Bush, an anti-infectives researcher at Johnson and Johnson (J&J) in Raritan, New Jersey, puts it--but that doesn't make it any easier to deal with. In 2002, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated that at least 90,000 deaths a year in the United States could be attributed to bacterial infections, more than half caused by bugs resistant to at least one commonly used antibiotic. Last October, CDC reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association that the number of serious infections caused by MRSA alone was close to 100,000 a year, with almost 19,000 related fatalities--a number, an accompanying editorial observed, that is larger than the U.S. death toll attributed to HIV/AIDS in the same year.
So far these outbreaks have been concentrated in hospitals, where the environment is particularly conducive to the acquisition and spread of drug-resistant bugs. But the big worry, for Fowler and others, is that they will spread to the wider community--a nightmare scenario, he says. MRSA is particularly worrisome, but so is another class of bacteria, called Gram-negative bacteria, that are even tougher to defeat. These include A. baumannii, which has plagued injured soldiers returning from Iraq. For these bacteria, the pipeline of new antibiotics is verging on empty. "What do you do when you're faced with an infection, with a very sick patient, and you get a lab report back and every single drug is listed as resistant?" asks Fred Tenover of CDC. "This is a major blooming public health crisis."
Right bug, wrong place
One of the many misconceptions about bacterial infections is that the bugs involved are not native to the human body or are particularly pernicious to begin with. Virtually all bacteria are capable of causing serious infections, at least in immunocompromised patients, although most do not. In hospitalized patients, many infections arise from the patient's own bacterial flora, flourishing where they're not supposed to be. Pneumonia, for instance, can be caused when bacteria from the mouth are aspirated to the lungs. Just as Escherichia coli is a normal inhabitant of the gut, S. aureus colonizes the skin and mucosal surfaces in the nose in 30% of the population. When it sets up shop somewhere else, S. aureus can cause a host of infections, including skin abscesses, necrotizing pneumonia, joint infections, and heart valve infections known as endocarditis. Similarly, S. epidermidis normally colonizes the human skin, but when it gets into the bloodstream, it can cause sepsis and endocarditis, as well as infections involving prosthetic devices such as pacemakers and artificial joints. The risk of acquiring one of these serious infections is highest in hospitals [or in a combat sport training facility] and health-care facilities simply because these environments offer the greatest opportunities for bacteria to enter the bloodstream or infect open wounds.
Treating a bacterial infection with antibiotics is the obvious first step. But in the 65 years since the first widespread use of penicillin during World War II, infectious-disease specialists have been treated to an ongoing tutorial in the many ways bacteria can acquire and spread resistance to these drugs. Unlike tuberculosis and other bacteria, in which antibiotic therapy simply selects for rare resistance-bestowing mutants, the bacterial strains that are so insidious in hospitals employ far more diverse techniques, says Louis Rice of Case Western Reserve University and the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center in Ohio. S. aureus and Enterococcus, for instance, can acquire resistance by exchanging entire genes or multiple genes with other bacteria, either through plasmids--loops of DNA that are independent of the bacterial chromosomal DNA--or so-called gene cassettes or transposable elements that can be inserted directly into the chromosomal DNA.Penicillin and all penicillin-like antibiotics are ringlike molecular structures, known technically as -lactams. They work by attacking a particular cell wall enzyme in the bacteria. The first strains of penicillin-resistant S. aureus, which arose within a few years of penicillin's introduction, were strains that have a survival advantage because they naturally produce an enzyme--penicillinase, one of a class of enzymes known as -lactamases--that destroys the ring structure of penicillin. Within a decade, the effectiveness of penicillin against hospital-acquired staph infections was "virtually annulled," says microbiologist Alexander Tomasz of Rockefeller University in New York City, by "plasmid epidemics" that then spread the penicillinase gene through the entire species of S. aureus.The pharmaceutical industry responded in the 1950s with a host of semisynthetic penicillins designed to be resistant to penicillinases. Methicillin, introduced in 1959, was believed to be the most effective. As Graham Ayliffe, a veteran hospital infection expert at the University of Birmingham in the U.K., recalled, "this was [supposed to be] the end of the resistant staphylococcus." Within 2 years, however, hospitals in Europe were identifying strains of S. aureus that were resistant to methicillin: the first MRSA strains.
Researchers later realized that these strains had taken a different route to acquiring resistance. Rather than generating new or different -lactamases, which could attack the antibiotic directly, they had acquired a new gene entirely, called mecA, that coded for a variant of the antibiotic's target: the penicillin-binding protein. When the antibiotics attack the original penicillin-binding protein, explains Tomasz, this "surrogate" binding protein "takes over the task of cell wall synthesis" and works to keep the antibiotic at bay. The mecA gene itself, says Tomasz, appears to derive from a common bacterium on the skin of domestic and wild animals known as S. sciuri. How S. aureus came to acquire the gene is a mystery, but since it did, it passes it on by exchanging entire gene cassettes with the mecA gene on them.
Breaking out
Through the 1970s and 1980s, MRSA remained little more than a nuisance bug, although occasional hospital outbreaks would have to be reined in with strict isolation and control programs. In the mid-1980s, typically only 1% to 5% of all S. aureus isolates were methicillin-resistant, says Henry Chambers, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco. Around that time, S. aureus began to acquire genes that confer resistance to other common antibiotics, apparently from methicillin-resistant S. epidermidis and carried on the same mobile cassettes as mecA. The result was a bug that was both far more difficult to treat and, as Chambers says, "pretty adaptive to surviving in hospitals." Today, 60% to 70% of all S. aureus strains found in hospitals are multidrug-resistant MRSA.
Worries intensified when MRSA appeared a decade ago as a community-acquired infection rather than one exclusive to health-care settings. In 1999, CDC reported on four deaths in Minnesota and North Dakota, all children, all caused by MRSA infections that could not be traced back to hospitalizations by either the patients or family members. Somehow the mecA gene had emerged in S. aureus strains outside hospitals or health-care facilities. "This was a real biological success story," says CDC's Tenover. "And it all happened off our radar screens." MRSA isolates then began to appear in a range of unexpected community settings: children in day-care centers, army recruits, athletes in contact sports, native Americans living on reservations, prison populations, intravenous drug users, and among men who have sex with men.
The possibility that these MRSA strains were simply hospital strains that had migrated out into the community was refuted by analysis of the gene cassettes carrying the resistance. In hospital strains, these cassettes are relatively large and carry multiple resistance-bestowing genes, explains Tomasz. The "oddball" cassettes carrying the mecA gene in the early community-acquired isolates were small and contained only the one gene. In the last few years, however, MRSA strains in the community have begun to acquire multidrug resistance, suggesting that they've been intermingling with the hospital strains.
A half-dozen community-acquired MRSA clones have now spread around the world as their prevalence in the community has continued to increase; in San Francisco, for instance, up to 50% of all S. aureus isolates outside health-care settings are now methicillin-resistant. "These methicillin-resistant strains seem to be replacing the susceptible strains of S. aureus in the general population," says Mark Enright, an infectious-disease specialist at Imperial College London (ICL), "which means people are carrying strains of MRSA in their nose in the community. Now when they get infections, ones that were formerly treatable are going to be replaced with difficult-to-treat infections."
The public health anxiety increased still further in 2002 with the detection of isolates of MRSA that were fully resistant to the antibiotic vancomycin, traditionally considered the last resort for treating resistant staphylococcal infections. These S. aureus isolates seem to have acquired a gene for vancomycin resistance--vanA--from enterococci, and specifically E. faecalis, which are part of the natural flora of the intestinal tract and can cause serious infections in hospitalized patients. When the enterococci developed resistance to common antibiotics in the 1980s, physicians had responded by using vancomycin to treat them. Vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE) was first reported in 1986, and the vanA gene soon spread throughout the species. Because enterococci readily exchange genetic information with other bacterial species, says Tenover, he and other experts assumed that it would soon pass vanA and vancomycin resistance to MRSA. "Everybody was waiting for the shoe to drop," says Tenover. In 2002 it did, when the Michigan Department of Community Health reported the first isolate of MRSA that had vanA-mediated resistance to vancomycin. The patient was a 40-year-old diabetic who had recently been given an extended course of vancomycin for a foot ulcer.
Fortunately, vancomycin-resistant MRSA--now known as VRSA--has not developed into the nightmare researchers feared. Only nine isolates have been detected worldwide in 6 years, seven from the same region in Michigan, which suggests that S. aureus, unlike Enterococcus, loses the ability to compete in the broader environment when it takes on the vanA gene. That only one of these infections was life-threatening suggests that the vancomycin-resistant bug also loses its virulence.
A paltry pipeline
Although MRSA and other Gram-positive bacteria remain a major threat, a half-dozen new antibiotics have either just been approved or are in the pipeline that should work well against them--at least until the bugs evolve more resistance. This is not the case, however, for Gram-negative bacteria, such as P. aeruginosa, A. baumannii, and K. pneumoniae. These bacteria have both an inner and outer cell membrane, as opposed to the single cell membrane of Gram-positive bugs like MRSA. (The name comes from how these bacteria stain on a Gram stain test.) The pipeline for antibiotics against Gram-negative bacteria, says Bush of J&J, is limited to development programs in a few small companies; only one drug has made it through phase I clinical trials.
Prompted by the emergence of MRSA and VRE in the late 1980s, pharmaceutical companies focused their attention on Gram-positive bugs. Meanwhile, many Gram-negative bugs became resistant to virtually every known antibiotic, or at least every antibiotic that isn't toxic. "These organisms may well start to spread into the community," says Tenover, "and then we really will be in trouble. We have drugs to fall back on for Staphylococcus. But when you say, 'Where's the next anti-Pseudomonas drug?' I have to scratch my head."
One reason for the dearth of drug candidates is that Gram-negative bacteria are simply harder to kill. First, they have the extra cell membrane the drug has to penetrate. Then they have other defense mechanisms that Gram-positives lack, such as the ability to activate pumps or close down protein channels in the membranes that let these antibiotics in. "They can have three or four mechanisms working at once," says Case Western's Rice. "Even if you develop a new drug entirely, these bacteria may be just as likely to be resistant to new drugs as old ones. It's just really hard."The problem has been exacerbated by the gradual exodus of pharmaceutical companies from antibiotic development--a trend that began in the 1980s and has accelerated since 2000, in large part because the market is iffy and the chances of success are slim. Of the 15 major pharmaceutical companies that once had flourishing antibiotic discovery programs, eight have left the field entirely, and two others have reduced their efforts significantly. That leaves only five--GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, AstraZeneca, Merck, and Pfizer--that still have antibiotic discovery efforts commensurate with the size of the problem.
Even though the market for antibiotics is in the neighborhood of $25 billion a year, says Steve Projan, vice president of biological technologies at Wyeth Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, other drugs, such as antidepressants or antihypertensives, offer a greater bang for the buck because they are often taken for years or decades rather than just a 7-to 14-day course. Resistance only compounds the problem: A drug that takes a decade to develop might be useful clinically for only a handful of years.
What's more, the better the antibiotic, the less health experts want to see it used to avoid the development of resistance. "It's probably the only area of medicine where a drug company can invest all this money to develop a drug, come up with a good one, and then the so-called thought leaders in the field, like myself, will tell people not to use it," says Rice. "We say it's such a good drug that we should save it."
As a result, virtually all the new antibiotics and all those in the pipeline for Grampositive bacteria are second-generation drugs, that is, incremental improvements on existing classes. The one conspicuous exception--daptomycin, developed for S. aureus by the late Frank Tally at Cubist in Lexington, Massachusetts--was first identified 20 years ago by Eli Lilly and Co. and then shelved because it had toxicity problems at high doses.
To the surprise of many, the recent sequencing of more than 650 bacterial genomes has been a "dismal failure" when it comes to drug development, says ICL's Enright. Although genome sequences were expected to yield a "treasure trove of new targets for entirely new classes of antibiotics," as David Pompliano and colleagues at GlaxoSmithKline in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, recently wrote, this simply hasn't panned out. At GlaxoSmithKline, Pompliano and his colleagues spent 7 years and more than $70 million evaluating more than 300 "canonical" bacterial genes that they thought were essential to the viability of the bacteria. The result was just five leads, a success rate, they estimated, that was four-to fivefold lower than for other areas of therapeutics.
Genomics is simply not a good paradigm for discovering new antibiotics, suggests Projan. The genetic approach assumes that a candidate drug can knock out a single gene in the bacterium to render it unfit for survival. But the drugs don't knock out a gene's activity entirely, he says; instead they modulate activity. "As we found out in oncology," says Projan, "sometimes leaving even 5% activity is enough for the tumor to grow. The same thing is true for bacteria." Projan and others suggest that the only route to a new antibiotic--short of pure luck--will be through more fundamental research on the basic biology of the bacteria.
Cutting back
Barring the discovery of miracle antibiotics to which bacteria cannot evolve resistance--a "laughable" notion, says one expert--the only foreseeable route to curbing antibiotic resistance will be to rein in the use of antibiotics. One obvious way is to lower the risk of acquiring resistant bugs in the hospital. Countries that have mandated rigorous infection control in hospitals, such as Denmark, the Netherlands, and Finland, have been able to keep MRSA infection rates low. These infection-control procedures, however, go far beyond physicians and nurses wearing gloves and protective masks and washing their hands before and after patient contacts., essential as those are. These nations employ a technique known as "active detection and isolation," or "search and destroy," as it's called in the Netherlands. Patients considered at high risk of carrying MRSA and other antibiotic-resistant bugs are cultured when they're admitted to the hospital, and periodic cultures are taken of all patients, particularly those in high-risk wards. The greater the prevalence of pathogens and risk factors, the more frequent this surveillance. Patients who are infected or are carriers are isolated. Health-care workers who are colonized with resistant bacteria can be "decolonized," using skin washes and nasal ointments
Whether U.S. hospitals should be required to implement active detection and isolation is a long-running controversy. Some specialists--led by University of Virginia epidemiologist Barry Farr, an expert on controlling VRE and MRSA--have argued that it's the only proven method to control hospital MRSA infections. Others have questioned the technique's cost-effectiveness and viability, particularly when rates of MRSA in the community are beginning to rival those in many hospitals.
Vaccines against antibiotic-resistant bacteria would also go a long way to reining in resistance, but only one such vaccine candidate, against S. aureus, has ever made it through phase III clinical trials: StaphVAX, licensed by Nabi Biopharmaceuticals. Although patients who received the vaccine had significantly lower rates of S. aureus infections at 40 weeks compared to controls, this apparent protection was lost at 54 weeks. A follow-up trial also failed to demonstrate efficacy. Several more vaccines are in development, including a new-generation StaphVAX. Even temporary protection could be useful, argue some experts, either for health-care workers, who could be vaccinated regularly, or for patients who are about to be hospitalized to undergo a procedure.
Ultimately, physicians will have to be persuaded to reduce their use of antibiotics, although that will be a hard sell. One step, for instance, would be to persuade physicians outside hospitals to treat only those patients who are truly infected. A 2001 study from the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center estimated that 55% of all antibiotics prescribed in the United States for upper respiratory infections were unnecessary. This is what Rice describes as the "get-a-little-sniffle-get-a-little-Levaquin" problem. "The patients want it," he says, and "the doctor wants to get the patient out of the office, and the quickest way to do it is to write a prescription." But the societal problem of antibiotic resistance should outweigh whatever personal peace of mind comes from the indiscriminate use of antibiotics, says Tenover (see sidebar on p. 360).
Similarly, many times physicians prescribe combination "broad-spectrum" antibiotics when a single "narrow-spectrum" antibiotic would do the trick. Understandably, says Rice, physicians are unwilling to wait to treat serious infections until the bug is cultured and they learn to which antibiotics it's still susceptible. But once the crisis is over, usually 1 to 3 days after starting therapy, physicians could switch their patients to the appropriate narrow-spectrum antibiotic.
What the field desperately needs, these experts say, are randomized, controlled trials to establish how long antibiotic therapy should be prescribed for different infections. The data are scarce, and misconceptions abound. The ubiquitous advice in the field--from physicians, patients, and even CDC--is that patients should continue the full course of antibiotics even after they feel better. Because antibiotics tend to have few side effects, physicians consider a longer course to be a no-lose proposition.
But from the perspective of preventing antibiotic resistance, says Rice, "this is totally wrong-headed." In patients with healthy immune systems, he explains, most antibiotics merely stun the bacteria sufficiently to make it easier for the host immune system to do its job. "You can take tetracycline until the cows come home," Rice says, and "all it does is stop most bacteria from growing. It doesn't kill them." Extending the course of the antibiotics unnecessarily increases the likelihood that the patient's normal flora will be inhibited to the point that bacteria resistant to the antibiotic will fill the void.The few existing studies on the necessary length of therapy have suggested that it is often surprisingly short. Urinary tract infections in young women can be treated with 1-to 3-day courses of antibiotics. The Infectious Diseases Society of America recommends a 3-day treatment for traveler's diarrhea, while acknowledging that 1 day appears to be equally effective. Studies from the 1940s suggested that the "vast majority" of patients with pneumonia get better after 2 or 3 days, says Rice: "Somewhere along the line, that morphed into 7 days, 10 days, 21 days, with no real reason other than making the doctor more comfortable." In May, the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases responded to the expert demand and put out a request for proposals for clinical studies that would determine the optimal use of antibiotics, including the optimal duration of therapy. "I think most physicians would respond to compelling data from a well-done trial," says Rice.
One beneficial side effect to curbing antibiotic use is that it may serve to rehabilitate those antibiotics that have lost their effectiveness. "Many of these were wonderful new drugs just 20 years ago, able to treat a wide variety of bugs, both inside and outside the hospital," says Rice. "Now we're at a point where some of them are next to useless, because they've been used for everything."

South Carolina may soon join the ranks of states that allow MMA in their state. A bill to lift the state's ban unanimously passed the state House yesterday and now heads for the state Senate, where easy passage is expected. This would make South Carolina the 38th state to leaglize MMA.

Tequila brand Tequila Cazadores has agreed a new sponsorship deal with leading mixed martial arts (MMA) promoter Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). Under the new deal, which runs until March 2010, Tequila Cazadores will be official spirit sponsor of UFC.
As part of its sponsorship Tequila Cazadores will be featured throughout the world on television broadcasts of UFC events, and in UFC digital and print media content and venue signage. Tequila Cazadores will also host adult consumer tastings, events and promotions to support the sponsorship.
Tequila Cazadores vice president and brand managing director Ariel Meyer said, “[The] UFC organization has helped create mixed martial arts into a responsible, safe sport, with strict rules and regulations for athlete protection and fair play.

Nature 454, 692-693 (7 August 2008) | doi:10.1038/454692a; Published online 6 August 2008
The science of doping
See associated Correspondence: Ljungqvist et al. , Nature 455, 1176 (October 2008)Faber, Nature 455, 1176 (October 2008)
Donald A. Berry1
Donald A. Berry is head of the Division of Quantitative Sciences, chair of the Department of Biostatistics and Frank T. McGraw Memorial Chair of Cancer Research, MD Anderson Cancer Center, University of Texas, 1400 Pressler Street, Houston, Texas 77030-1402, USA.
Email: dberry@mdanderson.org
Top of pageAbstractThe processes used to charge athletes with cheating are often based on flawed statistics and flawed logic, says Donald A. Berry.
Recently, the international Court of Arbitration for Sport upheld doping charges against cyclist Floyd Landis, stripping him of his title as winner of the 2006 Tour de France and suspending him from competition for two years. The court agreed with the majority opinion of a divided three-member American Arbitration Association (AAA) panel and essentially placed a stamp of approval on a laboratory test indicating that Landis had taken synthetic testosterone. Although Landis asserts his innocence, his options for recourse have all but dried up.
Already, in the run-up to this year's Olympic Games, vast amounts of time, money and media coverage have been spent on sports doping. Several doping experts have contended that tests aren't sensitive enough and let dozens of cheaters slip through the cracks. And some athletes are facing sanctions. Upon testing positive for clenbuterol, US swimmer Jessica Hardy was held back from the Olympic team and faces a two-year ban from the sport. She is attesting her innocence. China has already banned several athletes, some of them for life, on doping charges. Indeed, many world-class athletes will find their life's accomplishments and ambitions, their integrity and their reputations hinging on urine or blood tests. But when an athlete tests positive, is he or she guilty of doping? Because of what I believe to be inherent flaws in the testing practices of doping laboratories, the answer, quite possibly, is no.
In my opinion, close scrutiny of quantitative evidence used in Landis's case show it to be non-informative. This says nothing about Landis's guilt or innocence. It rather reveals that the evidence and inferential procedures used to judge guilt in such cases don't address the question correctly. The situation in drug-testing labs worldwide must be remedied. Cheaters evade detection, innocents are falsely accused and sport is ultimately suffering.
Prosecutor's fallacy
One factor at play in many cases that involve statistical reasoning, is what's known as the prosecutor's fallacy1. At its simplest level, it concludes guilt on the basis of an observation that would be extremely rare if the person were innocent. Consider a blood test that perfectly matches a suspect to the perpetrator of a crime. Say, for example, the matching profile occurs in just 1 out of every 1,000 people. A naive prosecutor might try to convince a jury that the odds of guilt are 999:1, that is, the probability of guilt is 0.999. The correct way to determine odds comes from Bayes rule2, 3, 4 and is equal to 999 times P/(1-P) where P is the 'prior probability' of guilt. Prior probability can be difficult to assess, but could range from very small to very large based on corroborating evidence implicating the suspect. The prosecutor's claim that the odds are 999:1 implies a prior probability of guilt equal to 0.5 (in which case P and 1-P cancel). Such a high value of P is possible, but it would require substantial evidence. Suppose there is no evidence against the suspect other than the blood test: he was implicated only because he was from the city where the crime occurred. If the city's population is one million then P is 1/1,000,000 and the odds of his guilt are 1001:1 against, which corresponds to a probability of guilt of less than 0.001.
The prosecutor's fallacy is at play in doping cases. For example, Landis's positive test result seemed to be a rare event, but just how rare? In doping cases the odds are dictated by the relative likelihood of a positive test assuming the subject was doping ('sensitivity') against a positive result assuming no doping (which is one minus 'specificity'). Sensitivity and specificity are crucial measures that must be estimated with reasonable accuracy before any conclusion of doping can be made, in my opinion.
The studies necessary to obtain good estimates are not easy to do. They require known samples, both positive and negative for doping, tested by blinded technicians who use the same procedures under the same conditions present in actual sporting events. In my view, such studies have not been adequately done, leaving the criterion for calling a test positive unvalidated.
Laboratory practices
Urine samples from cyclists competing in the 2006 Tour de France were analysed at the French national anti-doping laboratory (LNDD) in Châtenay-Malabry. This is one of 34 laboratories accredited by the World Anti-Doping Agency to receive and analyse test samples from athletes. The LNDD flagged Landis's urine sample following race stage 17, which he won, because it showed a high ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone.
Based on the initial screening test, the LNDD conducted gas chromatography with mass spectrometry, and isotope ratio mass spectrometry on androgen metabolites in Landis's sample. Such laboratory tests involve a series of highly sophisticated processes that are used to identify the likelihood of abnormal levels of plant-based androgen metabolites (from dietary or pharmaceutical sources) in a urine sample. The goal is to differentiate from endogenous androgen metabolites normally found in urine.
Mass spectrometry requires careful sample handling, advanced technician training and precise instrument calibration. The process is unlikely to be error-free. Each of the various steps in handling, labelling and storing an athlete's sample represents opportunity for error.
In arbitration hearings, the AAA threw out the result of the LNDD's initial screening test because of improper procedures. In my opinion, this should have invalidated the more involved follow-up testing regardless of whether or not sensitivity and specificity had been determined. Nevertheless, the AAA ruled the spectrometry results sufficient to uphold charges of doping.
During arbitration and in response to appeals from Landis, the LNDD provided the results of its androgen metabolite tests for 139 'negative' cases, 27 'positive' cases, and Landis's stage 17 results (see Fig. 1). These data were given to me by a member of Landis's defence team. The criteria used to discriminate a positive from a negative result are set by the World Anti-Doping Agency and are applied to these results in Fig. 1b and d. But we have no way of knowing which cases are truly positive and which are negative. It is proper to establish threshold values such as these, but only to define a hypothesis; a positive test criterion requires further investigation on known samples.
The method used to establish the criterion for discriminating one group from another has not been published, and tests have not been performed to establish sensitivity and specificity. Without further validation in independent experiments, testing is subject to extreme biases. The LNDD lab disagrees with my interpretation. But if conventional doping testing were to be submitted to a regulatory agency such as the US Food and Drug Administration5 to qualify as a diagnostic test for a disease, it would be rejected.
The problem with multiples
Landis seemed to have an unusual test result. Because he was among the leaders he provided 8 pairs of urine samples (of the total of approximately 126 sample-pairs in the 2006 Tour de France). So there were 8 opportunities for a true positive — and 8 opportunities for a false positive. If he never doped and assuming a specificity of 95%, the probability of all 8 samples being labelled 'negative' is the eighth power of 0.95, or 0.66. Therefore, Landis's false-positive rate for the race as a whole would be about 34%. Even a very high specificity of 99% would mean a false-positive rate of about 8%. The single-test specificity would have to be increased to much greater than 99% to have an acceptable false-positive rate. But we don't know the single-test specificity because the appropriate studies have not been performed or published.
More important than the number of samples from one individual is the total number of samples tested. With 126 samples, assuming 99% specificity, the false-positive rate is 72%. So, an apparently unusual test result may not be unusual at all when viewed from the perspective of multiple tests. This is well understood by statisticians, who routinely adjust for multiple testing. I believe that test results much more unusual than the 99th percentile among non-dopers should be required before they can be labelled 'positive'.
Other doping tests are subject to the same weak science as testosterone, including tests for naturally occurring substances, and some that claim to detect the presence of a foreign substance. Detecting a banned foreign substance in an athlete's blood or urine would seem to be clear evidence of guilt. But as with testing for synthetic testosterone, such tests may actually be measuring metabolites of the drug that are naturally occurring at variable levels.
Whether a substance can be measured directly or not, sports doping laboratories must prospectively define and publicize a standard testing procedure, including unambiguous criteria for concluding positivity, and they must validate that procedure in blinded experiments. Moreover, these experiments should address factors such as substance used (banned and not), dose of the substance, methods of delivery, timing of use relative to testing, and heterogeneity of metabolism among individuals.
To various degrees, these same deficiencies exist elsewhere — including in some forensic laboratories. All scientists share responsibility for this. We should get serious about interdisciplinary collaborations, and we should find out how other scientists approach similar problems. Meanwhile, we are duty-bound to tell other scientists when they are on the wrong path.
References
Buchanan, M. The prosecutor's fallacy. The New York Times (16 May 2007).
Berry, D. A. Stat. Sci. 6, 175–205 (1991). | Article |
Berry, D. A. Statistics: A Bayesian Perspective (Duxbury Press, California, 1996).
Berry, D. A. & Chastain, L. A. Chance 17, 5–8 (2004).
http://www.fda.gov/cdrh/osb/guidance/1620.pdf
Fig legend
Plots show the distribution of 167 samples of the metabolites etiocholanone and 5 -androstanediol (a, b), and androsterone and 5 -androstanediol (c, d). Panels b and d show samples the French national anti-doping laboratory (LNDD) designate to be 'positive' (red crosses) or 'negative' (green dots); the values from Landis's second sample from stage 17 is shown as a blue dot. Axes display delta notation, expressing isotopic composition of a sample relative to a reference compound.

It didn't deserve a MacArthur fellowship, but I don't see anything defensively dull or dimwitted about Josh Koscheck turning his hips and extending his arm to shield Paulo Thiago from pouncing on him Saturday at UFC 95.
Brian Cobb butt scooting and attempting a weak double-leg doesn't warrant a Nobel Prize in defense either, but I would hardly call it brainless or idiotic.
Unfortunately, it seems they still weren't "intelligent" enough.
Let me be clear about what this is, or more pertinently, what it isn't. This is not an assertion that any of the evening's contentious proceedings would've wound up with a different victor if allowed to continue. This is not a criticism of any of the stoppages at UFC 95, nor is it an indictment of officials Dan Miragliotta, Kevin Mulhall, Leon Roberts and Marc Goddard.
In fact, given the current climate of refereeing in MMA, all of the event's referees did their jobs to the letter and their stoppages were just.
Instead, this is an inquiry into whether the refereeing standards in MMA are appropriate. UFC 95 was not an assortment of irresponsible stoppages but an illustration of the intensifying issue of what constitutes a justifiable end to a fight, as the margin between winning and losing in MMA has become hideously deformed.
Great editorial by Jordan Breen

Hermes Franca Update
After having to pull out of UFC Ultimate Fight Night 18, Hermes Franca informed PDG that he will be having surgery in the next two weeks to repair a torn ACL on his knee and when he expects to return to the cage.
On how long he expects to be out of the UFC cage:
“I have to make sure that I take care of my injury and fully heal. I don’t care how long it takes as long as I am 100% when I return. Whether it takes eight months or one year, I want to recuperate to full health.”
FOR THE REST:

Hermes Franca – “Both guys are A+ level fighters and it is really hard to pick a winner for this fight. In my opinion the fans are going to be the biggest winners when this fight is over. In their first fight two years ago BJ came into the fight very strong and was able to push him around at the beginning but Georges St. Pierre won the second round and the third round was very close which lead to the split decision. I am going to stick with my pick that the fans are going to be the biggest winners.”
Rob Kaman –“This is a very tough fight to call. I think that BJ is the more animalistic fighter and that Georges St. Pierre is the more athletic fighter. Georges is always ready to go the distance and BJ’s conditioning has come into question throughout his career. This fight could end up being a fast win for BJ or decision win for GSP. They are both great fighters and like I said earlier, BJ is more animalistic in the sense that he enjoys punishing his opponents. Where as Georges St. Pierre is the more technical fighter, a pure athlete with the ability to knock out his opponents. I also think that GSP is going to have an advantage with his reach and it will be interesting to see how BJ counters that. If the fight ends in the first 3 rounds then I think it will be BJ. If the fight makes it into the championship rounds then I would have to take Georges St. Pierre.”

Georges St. Pierre, Rashad ‘Suga’ Evans, Karo Parisyan, Jeremy Horn, Rob Emerson and David Loiseau will have their signature line of shirts debuted at the Silver Star Clothing booth #22148, at the MAGIC trade-show in the Las Vegas Convention Center, February 17- 19, 2009.
Silver Star’s MMA collaboration includes: Rashad “Suga” Evans, who is known for defeating Forrest Griffin, the winner of the first season of “The Ultimate Fighter” reality TV show, and remains undefeated; UFC welterweight champion, Georges St. Pierre; one of the best welterweights in the world, Karo Parisyan; knockout master Rob Emerson; Jeremy Horn who have proved victorious against Forrest Griffin and Chuck Liddell; and David “The Crow” Loiseau. These fighters all have signature Silver Star tees honoring their athleticism and brute force, and more will be added to the Silver Star roster in the near future.
Silver Star is very excited to be working with these great fighters, and is presently in negotiations with Sean Sherk [one-time UFC lightweight champion] to bring him into the Silver Star fold.” said owner, Luke Burrett. “We have Rashad coming to sign autographs for fans and support the line at MAGIC, and I think this venture is going to be a very positive experience for all of us.”
Each high quality graphic tee made of 100% distressed cotton, and and includes foil accenting, with water-based dyes responsible for the powerful colors and no-hand-feel on the graphics. The art for these signature shirts is designed exclusively for the fighters, by Silver Star’s art team.